If you are anything like me as a researcher, creating your methods, especially early on in your project, can be one of the more challenging elements of your writing process. Still, it is essential to convey your work and your approach. Now, you may have your idea fully formed in your mind, or you might find that the various changes of your project involve you revisiting your methods regularly. Now, this article isn't to tell you how to start drafting your methodology. That's a topic for a longer article. However, I will share with you how to ensure you have all the components in your methodology for your dissertation or thesis.
Summarising your methods
The first section you need to start with, regardless of your academic discipline, is to direct your reader or examiner to a summary. So, what is the difference between qualitative and quantitative studies?
Qualitative Research
In brief, if you are a qualitative researcher, often those in social sciences, you are not observing numeric values. You focus on identifying trends, a gradual or series of changes within a system or group. The language or values that those whom you sample often your human subjects are using or discussing think about the emotion, the objective and the value attached to the words they use. You can then use this to examine the structure and systems that facilitate or govern the subject's particular behaviours or experiences. Often, you'll use various methods, such as surveys, interviews or observations, to collect this data.
Quantitative studies
Quantitative studies of the works of many typically assigned to in more formal science involve collecting numeric or measurable data. Conducting studies or experiments in a controlled setting, often in laboratory or sterile settings where one or more variables can be observed, manipulated or changed based on your methodology. These studies then involve data analysis, where you can look at how the data presents often in various graphs and against statistical tests, where you can compare this against your predictions and examine your hypothesis.
Your Summary
What do you need when writing your summary for your methods chapter?
First, you need to discuss your subjects or variables. You need to clearly and definitively summarise this, and I suggest doing this in a table. Show the reader who your subject is and the various important categories. This gives the number so that the reader can clearly and quickly reference this data again and again as you discuss your project. Describe the scientific units in your experiment, outline your variables, and how often you have repeated or replicated the study or experiment. It should articulate who or what the variate is and do it in a specific and distinct way so as not to make sure the reader understands. You can also complement by creating a figure or image to illustrate the flow of your methodology to illustrate it further. This technique makes it easier for the reader to refer to your work.
Revisiting Your Research Question Your Introduction
You need to set the scene now that you have expressed your data in a summarised format. This is where you lead on from your literature reviews and take the reader through what you see as the problem and your method of understanding it.
Addressing the Problem
Reflect on your literature. What are the various authors and topics you have discussed so far?
This is where you effectively summarise the situation which has led to your study. This is your core theoretical framework, which may be the scientific principles that make up the experimental protocol you are going to follow, drawing on the studies to evidence what problem they are trying to identify. Or the particular theories or positions the authors are trying to identify, and you are beginning to stitch together the story of your thesis that your reader is following. You outline the principles or theories you establish, which of these methods form the basis of your study, and you express or define why they are essential to addressing the subject area you seek to understand. These methods relate to your methods as a whole and, crucially, your Research Questions.
Your Solution
This is where you outline your theoretical or experimental approach. This is the true methodology, and this particular section is the area that needs far more time to unpack. This contains the types of approaches you aim to undertake, the design of the experiment this is your project itself, and how you have tackled the problem. Now, there are numerous different methods you may have chosen, and all of them should be informed by your Research Questions as well as the literature previously referred to as no research or experiment; even the groundbreaking kind will come from no foundation. New research techniques or experiments will still come from a base position that can be referred to or drawn from, even if some designs or tools have never been tried before.
Your Experiment
Now, break this particular element into as many sub-sections as needed. Each of these elements should be clearly discussed in their own right; this is where you are not only justifying why that method was used to collect the data. But what was the purpose of the data?
This is crucial to show your understanding of good research practice but also that you understand your accountability. It is also a suitable way to show you respect the resources and subjects you have used and hold yourself accountable when justifying each element, even if it is to collect an initial sample to inform the rest of your study. Remember, if you are using animal, human or generally any living elements, your justifications must be that bit more accountable. Try to structure this section in order; this is where the diagram you made earlier is particularly effective. It explains the overall flow of your experiment and project and helps the broader narrative.
Ethics and Further Considerations
This is where, unlike the latter section, where you explain your approach, you are justifying it. The ethics element, if required, is where, particularly in biological and social science research, you justify why your problem needed those particular subjects or resources. You will have elements of this already when you sought ethical approval, but this is where you justify how you have sought to minimise the impact of your project to the all but absolutely essential and also explain how the approach will cause the least distress as physically possible to the subjects of your study. This could be because your subject requires medical techniques, or it may largely be minimal and is more about the subject's time, but these are all areas that you should discuss in this section.
Data analysis
Regardless of the study you are conducting, you will collect data on how you identify what is relevant for your research and begin to explain which areas you will not focus on. Explaining why at each point along the way.
You start with the core theories and principles you will use as reference points for the analysis and how they link to your research. Then, you need to explain your analytical protocols, the steps you took, and why you took these approaches. This is where you begin to present what your research will show as an output and how this analytical approach will tease this information out of the data to help you and the reader understand it. This will then lead you to the values you begin to assign to your data, how you order it, and categorise it to make sense of the information. How does this information then inform the wider study you are trying to convey, and in what way does this address the problem you are aiming to solve?
Lastly, you have the tools you have used. These are the statistical tests or the software programs that have supported your work. This explains their usefulness and helps explain to future readers the tools that made your analysis possible.
Limitations
The final section that every methodology needs is the limitations. Take this as the opportunity to write everything that you wished you had done when trying to resolve your problem. Now, when you are reflecting on this section, this may be a resource or a circumstance limitation. A Resource limitation is where you have faced a particular barrier to either sourcing the subjects for your study or a limitation to the project itself. If you had more resources, you would have taken a different approach with some reflection on your project's direction. Meanwhile, the Circumstance limitation is more where, throughout your experiment, you have observed different challenges or experiences that presented areas to which you had a different approach. This is far more procedural than a resource limitation.
Final thoughts:
Now, this guide is to function more as part of your final reflections to help you ensure you have the key elements to present your thesis, dissertation or project successfully. Research methodology has many intricate parts, and the formulation of your approach is one of the more interesting elements of your academic journey. To help you find what method could help you take that leap forward, the subsequent "Research Skills 36" will break down different methodological approaches, and until then, please look at the papers below.
References:
https://www.sjsu.edu/writingcenter/docs/handouts/Methodology.pdf
https://gradcoach.com/how-to-write-the-methodology-chapter/